Because of the elaborateness of his work
as well as the thought-through vision (it feels like he’s exploring a
foreign land that somehow avoided modernism), it can seem that each
piece, each show, is part of some slowly unfolding, hypnotically
transfixing magnum opus. No wonder it can take him years between shows.

Kharmen, a new 22-minute film made
by digitally animating his graphite drawings, is currently being shown —
along with some of the original drawings for it — at Downtown’s Weston
Gallery. This is different, but related in style, to his previous film Jackleg Testament: Part One, for which he animated woodcuts.

Kharmen is part of the Seeing Opera groupexhibition
curated by Stewart Goldman, a longtime Cincinnati artist like Bolotin.
(Goldman also is professor emeritus at Art Academy of Cincinnati.) The
show, up through Aug. 31, was originally envisioned to accompany what
was to be Cincinnati Opera’s current season at Aronoff Center for the
Arts (where the Weston Gallery is located) while Music Hall was
undergoing renovation. That work has been delayed and the Opera has
stayed put, but this show has gone on.

Seven of the eight other Seeing Opera artists try to use their visual art to conjure associations with this year’s operas — Don Giovanni, Galileo Galilei, Aida and Der Rosenkavalier. Bolotin, however, goes his own way to create something new and forceful in its own right. (He previously composed Limbus: A Mechanical Opera.)

His Kharmen is somewhat based on Bizet’s 1875 Carmen (which
Cincinnati Opera will present next year), about a wild-spirited factory
worker in Seville.

It’s an ever-popular opera, but Bolotin’s vision of
it is both postmodern and steampunk.

One of his characters, the anguished and
anxious Mr. Sousaphone Man, “a former vaudeville actor turned wilderness
guide,” is traveling through the predominantly gray palette of his
landscape. Others fight to exist somewhere between abject flatness and
full dimensionality, but he just wants to get home and play his beloved
aria from Carmen.

Things aren’t completely gray — there is
some color, including a vividly red rose and feathers that float about
like elusive dreams.

When he finally gets a chance to play his
music, he doesn’t find release as much as … dread? A light explodes,
fire erupts outside a window and, well, trying to describe exactly what
is happening is bit like trying to catch an abstraction with a net.
Suffice to say, unlike The Drowsy Chaperone, which has a similar framing device, this isn’t a musical comedy.

Music from Carmen is featured on the film’s soundtrack, although not in any conventional way. Bolotin found an old 78-rpm recording of Carmen,
made by the RCA Victor Orchestra, and has sampled it being played on a
Victrola and Wax Cylinder Machine. For the aria, he recorded
mezzo-soprano Suzanne Lommler singing at Simpson College in Indianola,
Iowa.

The film’s music — so alluring and
haunting — also features Tatiana Berman on violin, improvising a solo
and ensemble parts based on a theme by Bolotin. And there are Russian
Orthodox and Hebrew chants by bass baritone Monte Jaffe.

There’s an overall sensibility to Kharmen
of a very dark, surreal take on Sholem Aleichem’s Eastern Europe,
though Bolotin gives source and title credit to absurdist Russian writer
Daniil Kharms. (He also lists his own project, The Book of Only Enoch,
as a source and gives the late local writer Aralee Strange credit for
“additional story supervision.”) There’s probably meaning to all this.
But before one gets to pondering it, you have to spend time considering
Bolotin’s artistic vocabulary. It is time well spent.

Supposedly the geese are involved in a
mating ritual by being there. There is a Warhol-esque deadpan to the
long takes of the slow-moving geese near the entrances of the
architecturally dreary mall. But you also start to think deeply about
the relationship of nature to the ever-encroaching suburban built
environment.